Speak, heart...or possibly not atm.

Apologies for the meagre word count this week. I’m just back from the most magical and beautiful wedding of my entire life and I'm too close to the incandescent heart of the experience to be able to write about it. I mean, it was so good, I have no words. Or even ~ it was so wild and free that to try to capture it with language would be like putting a lark in a cage.

There. Just demonstrated why I’m not about to write about it. At least, not yet.

But for now, this one’s in honour of Pippin, my elderly Guinea pig, who had to go stay in a five star Guinea pig hotel, while his loving slave and family decamped to a decidedly sketchy Airbnb for the duration of the preamble/foreword, wedding proper and postscript/epilogue. Four days in accommodation of questionable décor choices, inadequate kitchen equipment ( no cafetière? Say WHAT?) and saggy mattresses. I think Pippin probably had a far superior billet, but he might disagree. When little beasts grow old, I suspect that moving them out of their utterly familiar surroundings and rhythms can feel very destabilising. In truth, I feared that I might have signed his death warrant by boarding him out.

I won’t lie. I did pine for the Home Hutch after you left. But then, the Resident Laydeez of the Hotel made me feel very welcome. Very. Ahem. As the only Boy, I felt duty bound to pigsplain the world to them, and they proved to be a rapt and appreciatively wheeking audience. ‘Here is “Carrot”’ I would say, ‘Behold. Orange nutritional disk. Calorific equivalent of one hoom hamburger. Grown exclusively for Guinea pig consumption and downloaded from that big orange disk “Sun”’. No, really. I know whereof I wheek.

And also:

‘Here is Magic Bean^tm . Behold. Small brown pellet. Nothing whatsoever to do with moi. I have slaves for that sort of thing.’

Pippin wasn’t the only family member whose routine was shot to hell and back by the necessity of being summarily ejected from their home comforts and boarded out for the duration of the wedding.

I can hold a gruj. Me and elephants. Never forget. I missed my home comforts twenty five - seventeen. Twenty seven- four? Twenty four- er. Whatever. Minutes stretched into…er… stretchy things. And the noise. So loud barking. Woof, arf ,woof, yip, yip. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. So unculchoord. How could you? Filistynz. Total filistynz.

However, now that we’re back, Pippin and Vaila are sleeping it all off and I’m playing catch-up with all the things I left undone in the many weeks it took me to write a wedding speech. Weeks. I mean, in my normal working life, I have regularly stood up in front of huge numbers of small people and adults and delivered presentations by the dozen, but this - writing and saying a speech to accompany many slides¹ at my daughter’s wedding? The prep was off the scale.

When we returned home, Beloved and I picked up Pippin and Vaila, then had an afternoon nap, then got on with the unpacking and assorted tasks. Then we had another nap. Unheard of! And then slept like…like…like donkeys ( Arabic simile) till late the next morning.

And then got back to work. As you do. With our hearts and heads full of happiness. See you next wHeek xxx

1. Slides. Ah. Seventy slides curated from a lifetime’s collection of over 14,000. Over fourteen thousand images from thirty-one years. And sifting through these family archives stirred up the sediment at the bottom of my tank in a fashion you would not believe. Stirred, shaken, triggered, activated and then some. My dreams, in the run-up, were passing strange. My attention span, for anything other than the speech and the illustration thereof, was non-existent. And in the middle of all of this, I had to shift onto a new-to-me laptop. With new connectors that didn’t marry with old connectors, and other tech stuff too boring to mention here. But it was all a LOT.

Thankyou a thousand times to SK for chocolate and intercessions with the Child of Prague. Magic really works, right? xxx